Divine Envy

Whenever I experience an agreeable sensation in the company of others, I begrudge the part they had in the sensation. It strikes me as an indecency that they should feel the same thing I do, that they should penetrate my soul through their own concordantly feeling soul.

How can I take pride in the landscapes I contemplate, when the painful truth is that someone else has no doubt contemplated them for the same reasons I do? At other times and on other days, to be sure, but to call attention to such differences would be a pedantic consolation that’s beneath me. I know all too well that these differences are petty and that other people, with the same spirit of contemplation, have seen the landscape in a way not identical, but similar, to my own.

That’s why I constantly strive to alter what I see, thereby making it indisputably mine – to alter the mountains’ profile while making it every bit as beautiful, and beautiful in the exact same way; to replace certain trees and flowers with others that are vastly and very differently the same; to see other colours that produce an identical effect in the sunset. In this way I create, thanks to my experience and my habit of spontaneously seeing when I look, an inner version of the outer world.

And this is but the lowest level of replacing the visible. In my best and most intense moments of dreaming, I alter and create much more. I cause the landscape to affect me like music and to evoke visual images for my viewing pleasure – a peculiar and difficult ecstasy to achieve, since the evocative agent is of the same order as the sensations it evokes. My greatest triumph of this sort occurred when, during a moment of hazy light and atmosphere, I looked at the square at Cais do Sodré* and clearly saw it as a Chinese pagoda with odd bells hanging like absurd hats from the tips of its roof-tiles – a strange Chinese pagoda painted in space, painted I don’t know how on this satin-like space that endures in the abominable third dimension. And the moment smelled to me just like a cloth dragging somewhere far away, highly envious of reality…